There is a specific kind of depletion that is different from burnout, and it is almost never named correctly in the education leadership world. It’s the one that arrives not from doing too much work, but from absorbing too much pain. You know what I’m describing. The student whose home situation breaks your heart and…
You had a hard day. Not the kind you can describe as hard — the kind that is hard in ways you cannot explain to most people in your life, because they would not fully understand, and because some of it you are not allowed to share, and because the part you could share would…
There is no specific date. There is no event you can point to and say: that is when it happened. The shift occurs in the margins, in the spaces between the professional demands, in the gradual recalibration of who you are in response to what the role has been requiring of you for years. The…
The preparation program gave you the professional vocabulary. The instructional leadership frameworks. The organizational management models. The community engagement strategies. The legal foundations of school administration. The data analysis approaches. The knowledge you needed to pass the certification exam and present credibly in the hiring interview and begin the work with the language of the…
There is data. I want to begin with that, because the principal mental health conversation often gets framed as anecdote — as the individual struggle of specific individuals in specific buildings under specific pressures. It is not only that. There is a pattern in the data that is consistent, documented, and significantly more alarming than…
The professional reality that no administrative certification program prepared you for with adequate specificity: the district is not always the resource it presents itself as. Sometimes the district is the obstacle. The source of unrealistic mandates built on insufficient understanding of building-level conditions. Of resource allocation decisions that reflect political priorities rather than educational needs….
There is a version of my career that I have told in professional contexts for years. I have told it in conference presentations and hiring conversations and the introductions to professional development sessions and the conversations with aspiring administrators who wanted to understand what the principalship actually required. That version was accurate. It was not…
It’s 1:14am and you are wide awake, replaying a conversation that happened at 2pm yesterday. Not replaying it productively — you’re not problem-solving or planning what you’ll say next. You’re just running it. The parent’s tone. The exact words you chose. Whether you should have said something different. Whether your silence in that one moment…
It’s 3:15pm. A teacher just knocked on your door with a question that, two months ago, you would have answered in thirty seconds. Today you stare at them for a beat too long. The answer is in there somewhere. You just cannot get to it. You feel something between exhausted and irritable, and you don’t…
The principal is the institution’s primary carrier. Every significant problem in the building eventually moves toward the person at the top of the building’s hierarchy — because that person has the authority to address it, the accountability for whether it was addressed, and the specific positional visibility that makes them the logical destination for everything…